Generally, communication systems in which numerous transceiver terminals share the total available transmission capacity must employ some form of resource access control protocol to achieve an efficient use of that capacity. For example, in packet radio systems having bursty traffic, i.e. short sporadic transmissions, contention type protocols such as ALOHA, slotted ALOHA, and CSMA (carrier sense multiple access) are utilized to control access to channels resources.
Alternatively, or in combination therewith, access control can be provided through a channel reservation protocol, such as reservation ALOHA and related variant protocols like Priority Oriented Demand Assignment (PODA). These protocols typically require a group of resource competing transmitting terminals to listen to their own transmissions in order to receive any reservation information.
While such contention protocols improve utilization efficiency, problems arise in multiple-path or multiple-beam communication systems because a source and destination terminal can reside on different paths or beams. Thus, a transmitting terminal may not be able to receive any of its own transmissions. As a result, conventional reservation protocols such as reservation ALOHA or PODA will not provide a satisfactory level of access sharing and system utilization, because the only way to ensure receipt of the requisite reservation information is to have the destination terminal relay the reservation information back to the transmitting terminal. Such an arrangement can double the delay time for receipt of the reservation information, reduce terminal throughput, and use additional bandwidth.